Slammin Vinyl - WestFest 2005

We set off from London at 3pm on Saturday October 29th with a long journey ahead, 4 hours to be exact. South London to Shepton Mallet, two cars, five ravers and the rest of the M5 bumping all types of dance music from Hardcore to House. We turned up just as the gates were opening, a lengthy queue was starting to form although no where near as bad as last years, we weren’t looking forward to waiting in the cold, did I not mention it was just starting to turn into the Arctic style cold we are getting at the moment?!

The queue moved amazingly fast, security seemed to be on the ball, we all passed through the security without any problems, or searches but who am I to complain? Driving, queuing, & searching all complete, it was time to find the drumz room. It didn’t exist. Slammin, had for the first time put on a stage which combined the best of all worlds, taking the top few DJs and MCs from each genre and put them together in the biggest arena the venue had to offer. The downside of this idea was that the hardcore & drumz ravers had to share a room. After every other DJ the genre would swap and you would have 75% of the room wanting out, and quickly!

The venue had also had complaints about the noise levels at last years Slammin from local residents and the council had imposed strict sound levels that had to be adhered to. This ended up in a compromise of amount of doors to the venue being open VS volume. Slammin took the obvious route any promoter would, sadly this meant it took anything up to half an hour to change arena.

The overall production of WestFest was fantastic, all stages looked great and the sound systems were just about keeping up with what the ravers wanted. Main Stage, although in its existence caused many problems, was very well thought out and had a great atmosphere throughout. The Hardcore Awards took place, after each DJ an award would be presented, this went down very well. Info on who won awards can be found by just clicking below. http://www.slamminvinyl.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=305

I think this night was a bit of a failure overall as their were many people unsatisfied with there night, and if you were paying £40 to get VIP entrance you would not be too pleased. Slammin Vinyl have since issued a few statements to what happened on the night and have assured the people that the same issues that cropped up in October will not happen on New Years Eve.